A "Meeting Map" Spells Business Success

In many fast growth companies, meetings are shunned as a waste of time or tolerated as a necessary evil. However, meetings can be the life-blood of your business success, and a powerful tool to empower and engage your best workers. How can you “map” your meetings to work for you?

Mastering the Rockefeller Habits,by Verne Harnish, identifies three core practices of good management: (1) setting priorities, (2) marshalling data to track performance, and (3) establishing a rhythm of meetings and reports to manage both.

Harnish uses a one-page strategic plan to help companies set itspriorities and measure progress. It establishes indicators for measuring success on a multi-year, annual, and quarterly basis.

Some teams that manage fast-paced functions will want to meet daily in brief meetings called “huddles.”  These rapid-fire meetings track daily indicators, and flag issues for problem solving outside of the meeting.  Huddles take the company pulse to check its vital signs.

Weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual meetings track trends over longer time frames. These longer meetings use data to tee up critical issues and solve them in real time.  Every meeting looks backward and forward, guided by a standing agenda. 

Below is a matrix that maps the range of meetings that may take place at your company.  Each meeting has identified participants, a specified date and time, a set length, a tracked set of metrics, and a leader. This meeting map drives your one-page strategic plan on a daily basis through data-driven conversation.

Design your meeting map so that every company priority is tracked by a team, meeting at the right frequency, with the right data, and the right authority to act.  The one-page strategic plan, combined with this meeting map, leverages people power and disseminates focus throughout your company.

Jay W Vogt is President of Peoplesworth and author of Recharge Your Team: The Grounded Visioning Approach by Praeger.  Contact Jay via www.peoplesworth.com